Gates happy with “rapid” sales as Vista hits 140 million mark

16 months after the launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft has sold 140 million …

In May 2007, Bill Gates revealed that his company had sold 40 million Windows Vista licenses. During his final keynote in January 2008, Gates announced that Vista sales had crossed 100 million. Two weeks ago, when Microsoft released its third-quarter results, the company also revealed that Windows Vista had sold over 140 million copies. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gates repeated the number at a news conference and said: "That's a very rapid sales rate." The thing is, he's not that far off the mark.

Windows Vista has been available for a mere 16 months, and if you take into consideration estimates that state it took 51 months for Windows XP to reach 400 million users, Vista isn't doing that badly. On the other hand, Microsoft is counting sales and not users; many customers have decided to downgrade from Vista back to XP and these are counted in the sales numbers. From yet another point of view, Vista is pirated by millions and Microsoft isn't keeping track of these "customers."

Microsoft rarely gives out sales numbers, but it seems the company needs to remind everyone that Vista is still selling, despite the amount of bad press it has received. The company even recently started a viral campaign involving a "video relay" that promotes the operating system.

The general rule of thumb that businesses follow for adopting Microsoft's operating systems is to "wait for SP1." Last month, Microsoft released the remaining languages of Vista SP1, which hit the Release to Web milestone less than two months ago. Microsoft is crossing its fingers that businesses will begin to mass adopt Vista and slowly move away from XP, which is now a six-year-old operating system.